Autonomous, Palpable and Pulpable (1996)

Print reviews from the first edition of Break/Flow from 1996.

Various: Degenerative Prose (Black ice Books) 

Out of the genre-busting Avant-Pop camp, this collection from the litzine Black Ice is a welcome breath of fresh air to what passes for literary experimentation in this country. Why is it that British writers always play their roles and look to niche markets? Keep it legal, play it safe, call up the leaders and forget yourself. Much of the writing in this anthology, which could trace a trajectory to Raymond Federman’s Sur Fiction anthology of the mid 70s, doesn’t care less what writing is supposed to be, it doesn’t pamper to expectation, it problematises our conception of fiction – there’s not a plot or character in sight. In this way it inspires, it encourages an immersion in the chaos of experience rather than that drive to formalise and package it up. Thought provoking. Cool. 

(UK distribution by Turnaround).

Erik Belgum: Star Fiction (Detour Press) 

‘ Two stimulating pieces of writing that burst out of the confinement of fictional irreality.The  first, Star Fiction, blurs the erstwhile boundaries between fact, fiction and criticism by presenting several micro-stories that are followed by ironic analysis. The scope (>) this sets up is teasingly curtailed (<) by an overclipped, tight, sardonic prose – literary vertigo! The second piece Blodder, uses as its basis a hold-up in a drug store from which the perception of the incident of those involved is cut up and spliced. Straight chronology is fucked over and replaced by the focus being diffused through the instantaneousness of each characters’ thought during the incident. The sections that follow progress by means of a character peripheral to the hold-up. Unsettling but pure Bergsonism! 

(1506  Grand Avenue 3, St Paul MN, 55105, USA).

Asger Jorn: Critique of Political Economy (Unpopular Books)

A part of the situationist current that didn’t want to kill itself, Jorn delivers a highly inventive reading of Marxist economic theory that casts the stereotypes in a differing light – bringing to the theory of value the notions of movement, receptacle and energy! Value must be time not work. This heretical text has many prescient passages in that it opens up a number of exploratory avenues familiar to readers of post-structuralist stuff: dynamism, variability, use object,  acceleration. This pamphlet also comes complete with a critique of the situationist concept of spectacle that has the audacity to speak of art as a counter value: Art is the invitation to spend energy without any precise goal outside that which the spectators themselves bring  to it. It is prodigality. No wonder he had to leave the SI.

(Box 15, 138 Kingsland High Street, London E8 2NS). A free pdf download can be found HERE.

The Circled A and Its Parasites (Black Economy Books) 

Excellent, aggressive pamphlet that blows the whistle on the state of British anarchism, likening it to all other shades of political activism in that structurally and as a practice it is riddled with middle class sensibilities. The bass-line here seems to be that political activism has never collectively questioned the role of ideology, knowledge and modes of organisation that have been inherited from the bourgeoisification of the workers movement way back when. The middle-class pull the strings the working classes won’t dance like puppets.

(Dept 8, 1 Newton Street, Manchester M1 1HW)

Various: Technoscience and Cyberculture (Routledge)

On the whole this is woeful academic shit made up from conference papers. Check the flouncy D&G metaphors that abound near enough everywhere. Gucci. If it wasn’t for Arthur Kroker trying out the concept of a virtual class and sci-fi writer Samuel  Delaney’s musing on narrative and technology this would be strictly a glide down the conceptual catwalk. A waste of money… xerox the Delaney (Too available in every bookshop).

Félix Guattari: Chaosophy (Semiotexte)

Despite the naff title this excellent publication should become, not only the tributary text to the work of Deleuze and Guattari but also a primer and introduction to Guattari’s solo work which must surely be in the pipeline for translation.

In the English speaking world it is no surprise that Deleuze’s work is more readily available, for just as he is a most subversive and inspired philosopher, he did have stronger academic links than Guattari, which, through an at times highly formal approach, hindered the wider dissemination of many of Deleuze’s ideas. Guattari’s approach of animating heterogeneous specialities (transversality), his background in experimental psychotherapy at la Borde which stressed the collective arrangements of subjectivity production make Guattari much more than just a shadow figure in the collaborations.

Chaosophy contains interviews and autobiographical pieces that help set the practical and engaged context that characterise Guattari’s writings whilst underpinning an appreciation of their being part of a drive to widen and re-define the ‘political’. With this in mind it is pleasing to see that this book carries a large section on the less fashionable Anti-Oedipus which includes Guattari’s very clear appendix to this text which has been omitted from the English version.

Techno Zine Round Up

The long awaited third issue of Alien Underground will most likely appear on the web site http:/www.phuture.com. In the meantime, editor Christoph Fringeli has issued Praxis Newsletter 8 (BM Jed, London WC1N 3XX) which features articles, new urban noise reviews and a mail order link-up to the European underground. Also from the ‘Jed’ crew the TechNET bullshitters will be issuing another flyer containing an article made up from ‘Top 10s’, the further adventures of the Intensifier and the tentative ‘Music Changes Minds’. For urban hardcore terrorists there is FallOut from DJ Scud (64 Hollingbourne Road, London SW16 5NW). Phasis (71c Greyhound Lane, London SW16 5NW) aims to chart the ‘change, mutation and evolution’ of the scene. From France, the consistent TNT (49 Rue Marcadet, 75018 Paris) moves towards its 30th issue. In the States Skreem (11 Naves Road, Hampton, NH 03842 USA) forges transatlantic links.

In Memorium: Shimmer, Techno Connection.

• Other texts by Break/Flow on datacide-magazine.com
• Table of contents of Break/Flow #1

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